I'm Back

Wow! The Blogger program has sure changed since I fired off my last opinions into the blogisphere. I suppose that’s for the better... but you can bet your bottom dollar that "old dog new tricks" problem will appear as soon as I try to take it for a test drive.

I'm really living rather adveturously these days, because I'm also about to experiment with e-book publishing for the first time. An acquaintance of mine, who seemed to be spending a lot of his time hanging out with his Apple laptop in a coffee shop that I also happen to frequent, got me interested in this new venture. Much to my surprise he turned out to be writing children's books for sale on Amazon's "Kindle Direct Publishing" rather than surfing the web for whatever.

It just happens that I self-published a cartooned booklet about the real estate industry back in the good old days of typewriters and printing presses some 40 years ago, and I found in reviewing it with some friends, that while the numeric values it contained were totally out of date, the points that I was attempting to make were equally valid today as they had been almost half a century earlier.

So my next job will be to use my scanner and an optical character recognition program to digitize the work then convert the book into a file format that is appropriate for the online e-book publishing company or companies that I choose.

Will I make any money? Somehow I doubt it, but nothing ventured, nothing gained, and it is always interesting to try something new.

Wish me luck

Worried about catching a computer virus???

As a result of receiving yet another of these apparently helpful "pass it on to all of your contacts" e-mails the other day, I took it upon myself to check it out with a real computer expert. (Thanks Andrew) and while I was checking this one out, asked for a reliable way to find out about these things for myself in the future. Not unexpectedly, today's "Postcard virus warning" about a computer virus masquerading as a postcard from a friend or family member, did turn out to be just spam.

Along with this information, I received the following tried but true advice about how to check the validity of email warnings like this. "Ignore them, do not pass them on. Install a good anti-virus program that you trust, that gets updates daily from the mother ship. If you don't believe that they are keeping up to date with the set of viruses, replace it with another program."

This computer must be really really sick.

If still in doubt, check it out on the web at http://snopes.com. While on that website myself, I discovered a page of "urban legends" which apparently "compiles the 25 urban legends currently circulating most widely, as determined by frequency of access, user searches, reader e-mail, and media coverage". Very interesting.

I highly recommend this particular snopes.com site to the more gullible, so that they can avoid circulating any or all of these strange but untrue stories around the water cooler... or not, because some of them are at least good for a laugh.

And yes, the "Postcard virus warning" is once again on the snopes hit list, although it has been around as a number of variations for years... and never was as dangerous as it frequently purports to be.

Take care. It's a dangerous world out there!

Just a walk in the park

The other day, with the sun shining down on our island paradise as usual, I was enjoying my afternoon stroll along the beach trail in Rathtrevor Park when I was accosted. No not like that! By a television reporter with a very large shoulder supported video camera.

He wanted to know "if I was at all worried about the Cryptococcus Gattii virus". I replied "not in the least", and when he posed the expected follow up question. "Why not"? I said that I had read that I was many times more likely to be involved in a car accident on the way to the park, than to be attacked by that particular bug.

Actually its not a bug or a virus or even a Mafia Don, but rather a yeast like fungus that appears to have migrated to BC from some tropical or sub-tropical clime such as Papua or Northern Australia, possibly thanks to atmospheric warming. It has also now been detected in both Washington and Oregon States. Its airborne spores can cause various lung diseases, meningitis, and miscellaneous other rather unpleasant disorders, and may actually have been the cause of some 8 deaths within the 218 cases diagnosed during the past 10 or so years in BC, in addition to a number of other fatalities in the United States. Unlike most causes of human sickness, it is also known to affect animals, including dogs and cats, dolphins and koalas, with the latter specie being rather less likely to be a victim in our area.

Nice fish!

And the bottom line: I wished my wandering reporter a safe return home to Victoria, commenting that I trusted he would not himself stumble upon a Cryptococcus Gattii, or a grizzly bear while visiting our park. Not surprisingly, the local Chamber of Commerce was apparently responsible for removal of the signs warning of the fungus... not at all good for business. And no, we don't have grizzlies on our island... they are not allowed to board our beautiful new, and rather expensive, BC ferry fleet.

That's all I've time for today folks... I'm off for a walk in the park.

The Five Minute Rule

I don't know when I first heard of this principle, but whenever or where-ever it was, or who-ever came up with it first, I have been most thankful that I did learn to live by "the five minute rule".

This is a concept that acknowledges that it is quite impossible to remain positive at all times, no matter how strongly you believe that you should... particularly immediately following a serious setback in business or in life. The idea is that on such difficult occasions it is absolutely OK to rant, complain or otherwise vent, if that provides a form of release in the moment... but never to do so for more than five minutes before getting back on an even keel mentally, accepting the circumstances, and either challenging yourself to develop solutions to the problem, or concentrating on the next priority item in your to do list.

Only five minutes more

I have had both friends and employees wonder out loud, just how I managed so quickly to recover my equilibrium after encountering a serious set back, and on those occasions I have frequently explained my five minute rule to them, and also strongly recommended that they adopt it for themselves.

I know a few who did, and also more than a few who to their detriment were unable to do so, or unwilling to give it a try.

That is why when greeted with a: "How are you"? I will often reply: "Terrific but improving", while many other will, with very little enthusiasm, respond to the same question: "As well as can be expected".

Headlines and punchlines

Sometimes a headline conveys the sense of an entire story. It really jumps off the page and smacks you right in the eye. Other-times you may have to read on into the first paragraph, but rarely any further than that to garner the gist of the news of the day. That's the way journalists are trained to write, and news editors are trained to edit. This technique has certainly been reinforced by the invention of Google and the other web browsers of the world whose hoards of spiders haunt the internet seeking out these juicy titbits.

One hedtline that attracted me recently was: "Daily dose of exercise can be lower"... and continuing with: "This country (Canada) is witnessing a rising tide of gluttony and sloth"... Oh my, that's a turn of phrase that conjures up a dismal image, isn't it? (Canwest's Montreal Gazette 14 May 2010). Actually on this occasion it was necessary to continue into the following paragraph to learn that the ubiquitous "they", based on an analysis of more than 500 research papers, had concluded that 30 minutes of exercise a day was adequate to maintain the typical adult in reasonably fit condition.

Perhaps my favourite headline of all time was one that appeared in the "Scotsman", (one of Scotland's two premier news papers) some 60 years ago: "The floodgates of Hell have opened"... which greeted the news that the laws of my homeland had changed, and that the pubs would in future be permitted to serve booze on Sundays. I can't help wondering ow they would have headlined the Eyjafjallajökull (how on earth do you pronounce that?) volcano eruption in Iceland, or the BP oil rig fire and subsequent oil burning on the surface of the ocean in the Gulf of Mexico. Perhaps: "The floodgates of Hell have re-opened"?

As you can probably tell after following my blogs, I have always rather fancied myself as a headline writer. That's a real job you know, and as with all jobs there are a few really talented practitioners, and others who just can't quite make the grade because of a lack of imagination, creative talent or an adequate vocabulary.

I'm off to read today's headlines on Google... even if the bad news is bound to overwhelm the good news as usual. Perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised?

When I grow up

I never really knew what I wanted to be when I grew up... and perhaps I still don't.

I know that I never had a yearning to go to university, and probably would have preferred some technical college or even trade training, if not for parental expectations. But I must say I am grateful to them, and certainly have never regretted the time or energy spent in obtaining my science degree, nor the extra-curricular good times I had during my years at Edinburgh varsity. Never-the-less, I do occasionally catch myself wondering if I'd ever voluntarily opt for this particular form of schooling again.

Perhaps the fact that I decided, following my final exams, to go immediately into the army to do my mandatory national service, rather than waiting for my graduation ceremony several weeks later, says it all. I was definitely impatient to taste life after university, after all, wasn't it a fact that my allotted span on earth was already one quarter spent by graduation day. Surely there were more important things to experience and accomplish in life than absorbing more book learning in preparation for it?

 Happiness is... not knowing the future.

During my business career I frequently had to hire employees, and latterly had the responsibility for filling our company's senior executive positions. While the respective educational qualifications of the candidates was always a primary consideration, over the years I came to believe that this particular score card did little more than indicate an ability to learn for, and write exams. Far more important to my assessment was their verifiable work experience, and my own gut feeling that their work ethic, attitude and personality would complement those of our corporate team and our objectives. Back in those good old days, many workers remained with an employer for a lifetime, and it was sometimes necessary to employ head hunters to discover executives who were happily employed elsewhere, but might be convinced to transfer if tempted with the right incentive package.

Obviously times have changed, and with them, the employment picture and strategies, not to mention the high-tech revolution that has overtaken most industries. It's an employers' market now, and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future. Because there is so great a choice, no doubt many corporations will be tempted to start their search with pre-determined high educational criteria, whether or not the job to be filled really requires a that degree of learning.

On the other hand, it is the candidate with the best education who will normally find his or her foot in the door first, so far be it from me to suggest that a good secondary education is not, at the very least, an effective insurance policy for job security.

Seriously

A cup of my favourite Americano coffee at my favourite Starbucks clone coffee house, just jumped by almost 20 cents, increasing from $2.25 to $2.44. Do you realize that that computes to an extravagant $73.20 for one cup per day in a 30 day month... and many of these custom coffees cost upwards of $4 or even $5... and some people appear to be addicted to them, drinking several each day. I guess my age is showing again because I can remember when a good cuppa joe would cost a dime, and an alcoholic might not have been able to run up a booze bill to the stratospheric level of this coffee shop's charges.

How many cups of coffee can you squeeze from a single 1 Kg, $8.00 tin of MJB, or any other grocery store brand, at between 5 and 8 grams per 17 oz cup of coffee (according to the fine print on the can)? That equates to between 125 and 200 cups doesn't it? Or 4 to 7 cents worth of coffee per cup?

Now I realize that the barristas, as the servers who build these fancy drinks are now known, must certainly require at least one university degree in coffee brewing to qualify to use the horrendously loud, steam emitting contraptions that have replaced many of the good old coffee drip machines. Surely the Starbucks of the world are entitled to make a modest profit, but $5.00 for a cup of java... gimme a break Matilda. That's enough to drive a good man to drink.

 Etiquette or ostentation?  Tea anyone?
And then there are the tea sippers and servers. Every Tom Dick and Harry (is there no female equivalent to these inconsequential names?) who has been able to dream up an exotic name for a tea flavour, appears to have done so, and they all seem to be competing to make their brand the most expensive in the world. Most of them also insist in packaging their particular herbal poison (I don't like tea) in colourful little envelopes, and wrapping their tea leaf concoctions in little cotton bags with an attached thread and another colourful label dangling from that. Oh my, I'll certainly have to train my pinky finger to stand out from the cup handle so that I can adequately advertise my superior upbringing.

No wonder that so many nations are now having problems balancing their respective budgets. Certainly many of their citizens now realize exactly what the consequences are for living beyond their individual means.

Photo opportunities

In the political world, there are some who have a special talent for being in the right place at the right time, to show their best smile for the camera. And you'd better believe that this finely honed talent is frequently aided and abetted by some of the best public relations brains that money can buy.

I, on the other hand, might be called an opportunistic photographer. I have a camera with me virtually wherever I go. Sometimes that camera may just be a compact digital model, although even that one has a 12 times optical zoom, plus most of the bells and whistles that we have come to expect in the more expensive SLRs. In an emergency I can always fall back on my iPhone and its 3 MP chip.

A completely natural pose.


Sometimes I refer to my photos of people as candid shots, but because they are rarely posed, many wind up being deleted after I've had a chance to view them on the computer. However, the occasional ones that are worth saving have a natural look that reminds me of the un-posed photographs of wildlife, that are in truth, my favourite subjects anyway. And I've certainly never been even remotely interested in photographing politicians for posterity, or for the record, or for any other political reason.

In any event, based on my many years of recording the sometimes peculiar antics of the human species, I am now totally convinced that birds, animals and even fish, make much more interesting and photogenic subjects than do their human counterparts... particularly those of the political persuasion.

Famous last words

Well, not necessarily last words, but totally memorable ones never-the-less.

Do you remember any, many, even all, of these lines from movies past?

Are there others that have become firmly etched into your memory?

Perhaps you may even have quoted some of them in your own real life situations? It seems to me, I may have borrowed nearly all at one time or another.

"Here's looking at you kid"

Humphrey Bogart - Casablanca

"I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse"

Marlon Brando - The Godfather

"You've got to ask yourself one question. Do you feel lucky? Well do ya, punk?"

Clint Eastwood - Dirty Harry

"I'll be back"

Arnold Schwarzenneger - The Terminator

"Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn"

Clarke Gable - Gone With The Wind

"A martini, shaken not stirred"

Sean Connery - Gold Finger

I always believed that a picture was worth a thousand words, but perhaps the reverse is also true, and a few words may also conjure up many great pictures?

This blog may be the closest I will ever come to philosophizing, so perhaps I should restrict the broadcasting of my simple thoughts to the good old blogosphere, rather than competing with the likes of Plato, Socrates, et al. (Actually blogging is a relatively new phenomenon, having existed in its present electronic form only since approximately 1994, and it didn't achieve its current extraordinary popularity until about three years ago).